Reading to Learn

Remembering our way through Reading!

By: Jessica Horsefield

Rationale: A major component to fluent reading and reading to learn and understand is comprehension.  Comprehension of books is one of the goals behind reading with speed.  We want our students to be able read fast enough to make sense of the text. To comprehend the meaning of text, students must learn strategies to be successful.  If a student can read a text quickly and then let us know what happened, they are achieving comprehension and will be able to read quickly and learn from books. This lesson will help students learn how to form a topic sentence as a form of summarization.  They will accomplish this through a series of modeling and practice.

Materials:

One copy per student of Magic Tree House Research Guide #16: Polar Bears and the Arctic: A Nonfiction Companion to Polar Bears Past Bedtime By: Mary Pope Osborne and Natalie Pope Boyce (A Stepping Stone Book, 2007)

Lined paper and pencils per student

White board and Markers

Rubric for assessment:

 Rubric (I will take notes and either check yes or no)

Name:

Main point (Did they find it?):

No repeated information:

Are all sentences original, not straight from the book?

Do the sentences retell the events?

Procedures:

1. Introduce lesson:  Today we are going to learn how to summarize the books and stories that you read. When you summarize something, you are just giving a short overview of what happened. An example of a summary is when I read to you as a class. I don't always read the entire story, I give you a general idea and summary of what happened.

2.   Today I am going to give you a new book to read.  The book is called Polar Bears and the Arctic: A Nonfiction Companion to Polar Bears Past Bedtime. It is going to tell us all about polar bears and their living habits and habitat.

3. Before they begin reading the story, I will go over a summarization strategy. Say: Make sure that when you are reading the story, it makes sense to you. Do not be afraid to stop at the end of paragraphs, pages, or even sentences and think about what you have just read. If it does not make sense, go back and read it again before you move on. Try and summarize what you have read as you are reading. Make sure you ask yourself why things are happening or how things are happening so that you are finding only the important information.

4.  They need to understand that they should delete repeated and useless information.  Say: Make sure that what you are summarizing actually lets us know the plot of the story and what is going on. Some stories have a lot of fluff that is fun to read but does not really add to the plot or give us any new or useful information.

I will make sure that they understand this by modeling for them and reading the first page of the polar bear text. To do this I will read the first page of the story aloud and list a few review sentences or key words or important pieces of information on the board.  Then to make sure they understand the process of summarization and informally assess, I will let them choose the sentence that best summarizes the page that I read aloud to them. We will then discuss why that sentence was the best option.

5.  Say: Now I would like for everyone to try to summarize for themselves! I would like for everyone to finish the next two chapters, reading silently so that you do not disturb or distract your neighbor. As you read, you might want to take notes to make sure you remember all of the big points of the story.

6. When you have finished reading the story, I would like for you to write a summary, in your own words, what happened. Ask yourself questions like: Why is the arctic so cold? How do polar bears cross thin ice? How did people learn to survive in that harsh climate?

7. For assessment, the teacher will collect all of the student's papers to see if each student was able to pick out the important information in the chapter and correctly summarized the chapter.  The teacher will have a checklist that she makes up to see that the children have hit all of the important points.

References:

Magic Tree House Research Guide #16: Polar Bears and the Arctic: A Nonfiction Companion to Polar Bears Past Bedtime By: Mary Pope Osborne and Natalie Pope Boyce (A Stepping Stone Book, 2007)

How Do We Sum That Up?  By: BeLinda Thornton

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